Interrogation room

There,

In Srinagar,

In bylane behind a bylane,

Surrounded by empty darkness

And plastered in sound-muffling mud

Is an old workshop,

that was once a home

Where they break

little boys and old men

to make them sing

Miraculous little white lies

before sending them off

To be sold in small bottles

in the weekly bazar

Next to silken wounds

woven in absurdities

Our tangled, unkempt memories,

Lie strewn around the floor

like discarded histories of former lovers

and a single, solitary question

scribbled by broken fingernails

across ugly walls,

barely visible under hurriedly

whitewashed walls,

Am I dead yet?

Comments

In Barely Discernible Darkness

I will trace the Jhelum Across Your back with my fingers In barely discernible darkness It will form a paisley Drawn from the memory of An imagined Kashmir No language spoken by Man or Gods shall be Uttered that night Words will be melded, Sentences molded to form A new language of love The ink, a fine powdered Amethyst, shall dry as We write its grammar The quill tips, fashioned From old bones, shall Burn in its blaze The room will be Full of scorch marks In barely discernible darkness -- Tz

Surviving Kashmir

In Kashmir Tragedy doesn't strike you, It seeps inside you, like a malignant disease Slowly making its way to your brain, Disintegrating your mental faculties, one by one. Taking you apart one minute at a time, making happiness A sepia picture that grandfather Put up on the wall of the ancestral house, That is now just a road, with every passing car Raising dust over your family tree, the room where You once crawled, teeming with unruly pedestrians, Grounding your memories to mere dust, walking by an invisible house with blue windows and tin sheeted gate. In Kashmir, tragedy doesn't seek you, it survives you.

Its Scary

Imran Qayoom would have turned 26 this October, but a CRPF bullet and lathis ensured that the only brother of two sisters would never see another birthday. A black flag, hung over the gate of his under construction home in the Bagh-e-Mehtab area, announces silently that Saturday will mark the 40th day of Imran’s death. Imran died on the 12th August along with 11 others who were victims of police and CRPF firing on that day, the day after authorities had imposed a curfew following the death of Hurriyat leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz during the ‘Muzzafarbad Chalo’. At the time Imran was shot he was standing on the main road along with his friends watching the CRPF battle with pro-freedom protesters hardly hundred meters from his home. His friend, Suhail who was with Imran at that moment says, “ We were watching the protesters. When suddenly the CRPF started firing from one end of the road to another end. I looked to my side and saw that Imran was covered in blood, but he was still breathing....

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